knolli wrote:The most important aspects of Roleplay, your characters personality, who he is and what he wants, cannot be calculated.

I dare you to check out the Burning Wheel Fantasy Roleplaying System and see if you still think so. It's a brilliant fantasy game that pits characters' beliefs against instincts against goals rather than pitting one bucket of damage dice instead of another bucket of hit points.

knolli wrote:The most important aspects of Roleplay, your characters personality, who he is and what he wants, cannot be calculated.

I dare you to check out the Burning Wheel Fantasy Roleplaying System and see if you still think so. It's a brilliant fantasy game that pits characters' beliefs against instincts against goals rather than pitting one bucket of damage dice instead of another bucket of hit points.

It seems I stand corrected. Too bad my birthday was just recently, otherwise this book would be on top of my wish list.

mgb519 wrote:It streamlines character creation and makes actions a simple process and can be played with only a d20. It's fairly concrete, as opposed to "successes," yet allows for more than one outcome from a situation.

mgb519 wrote:Well then, I'm trying to make a system which streamlines character creation, advancement, and gameplay without becomng obscure or overly simplified. There's a balance I want to achieve. I'm also trying to provide opportunities for choices with tradeoffs, so that there are reason why someone would take one approach to a given situation over another, yet someone else would take the other approach. Can you critique from there?

The big hole in your design right now is that you're only offering one approach: find an enemy and reduce his hitpoints to zero. Even if you toss in a paragraph here or there about diplomacy or subterfuge or craftsmanship or whatever, it won't change the fact that the game is "about" damage rolls.

Now if you want to pursue the streamlining and character customization goals further, you should take a look at the way FATE accomplishes this stuff.

FATE breaks from many other role-playing games by eschewing the use of mandatory traits such as Strength and Intelligence. Instead, uses a long list of skills and assumes that every character is "average" in all skills except those that the character is explicitly defined as being good at. Exceptional abilities are defined through the use of Stunts and Aspects.

Stunts are exceptional abilities that grant the character a specific mechanical benefit; these may be drawn from a pre-defined list of stunts included in the rules, or created following guidelines provided by the authors. Aspects, on the other hand, are always defined by the player. For example, a player may choose to give their character an aspect of "Brawny" (or "Muscle Man" or "Wiry Strength"); during play, the player may invoke those aspects to gain a temporary bonus in a relevant situation. Aspects may also relate to a character's possessions, e.g. the character Indiana Jones for example, might have the Aspect "Whip and Fedora".

Aspects are an important and original concept in FATE. They are not intrinsically good or bad; they are simply descriptive, up to the level of detail the player requires. In addition to the obvious direct character help in most cases, the FATE system also provides a mechanism to reward the characters when one of their aspects has restricted their choices or landed them in some trouble.

Hmm. Maybe I'll just transform it into a dungeon crawl, then. Perhaps the major flaw is that a lot of the depth relies on the ability of the GM to tell the story, and when you try to shove that responsibilty into the system it doesn't work. Would this be an accurate statement?

Tzan wrote:

Semaj Nagirrac wrote:Well, I took some land without checking if it was owned by a faction or not. I'm not going to be banned, am I? I can destroy everything if need be.

In the same sense that trying to shove responsibility for swimming onto a car doesn't work, because a car isn't a boat. On the one hand you can tell the driver to abandon the car and start swimming, but on the other hand if you knew from the beginning that your destination was in the middle of the lake, then you should have been designing a boat to begin with.

That being said, if you do find you've ended up building a car instead of a boat, there are a lot of nice places you can take a car instead.

Ross_Varn wrote:See, whenever you drop tidbits like this, Mike, it makes me wish you'd do it more often. It's compelling, brilliant advice on a subject I'm highly interested in, that I can't seem to find elsewhere.

Yeah, but how often is somebody willing to put the effort in and stick their neck out like mgb, especially after I told him in advance that I'd troll it mercilessly. If you put an effort on the table then I'll troll you too.

But the better way to find out about this stuff is to listen to game design podcasts, and it's a lot easier now that there are huge archives of them. I'm thinking of Master Plan, Sons of Kryos, Theory From the Closet and the like.

Ross_Varn wrote:See, whenever you drop tidbits like this, Mike, it makes me wish you'd do it more often. It's compelling, brilliant advice on a subject I'm highly interested in, that I can't seem to find elsewhere.

Little else to add to that but: Thank you, Mike, I learned much yesterday. .

stubby wrote:In the same sense that trying to shove responsibility for swimming onto a car doesn't work, because a car isn't a boat. On the one hand you can tell the driver to abandon the car and start swimming, but on the other hand if you knew from the beginning that your destination was in the middle of the lake, then you should have been designing a boat to begin with.

That being said, if you do find you've ended up building a car instead of a boat, there are a lot of nice places you can take a car instead.

As simple as it seems to make a boat, most of the so-called plot driven PRGs on the market are cars, and many of them can be found floating in the lake; or at its bottom. Some cars even seem to be waterproof and have paddles you can fix to the tires, but they are cars nevertheless. I have some theories, why. In the first place neither GM nor players know that the car they are sitting in isn't supposed to cross the lake and try to do it anyway. Mostly because they don't know what a real boat looks like. Others have gone so many miles in their beloved car that they don't dare to leave it, even if they reached the ozean.Even many game designers try improve the car's floating abilities, but won't let go of the wheels (combat mechanics). The bizzarrest thing out there would be a Formula 1-monstertruck with farming tools, a sail and wings - and a trailer full of stuff you can add when needed, like super boosters or a hyperspace engine.

I did the mistake to try to roleplay in RtD, stupid me.

stubby wrote:But the better way to find out about this stuff is to listen to game design podcasts, and it's a lot easier now that there are huge archives of them. I'm thinking of Master Plan, Sons of Kryos, Theory From the Closet and the like.

I (and probably most of us here) didn't know such things existed and come here instead to find the support they need.

stubby wrote:Yeah, but how often is somebody willing to put the effort in and stick their neck out like mgb, especially after I told him in advance that I'd troll it mercilessly. If you put an effort on the table then I'll troll you too.